Harry Reid: If Ernst Wins Iowa Senate, Republicans Will Take Majority

Democrat Senate Majority leader Harry Reid is warning that if Republican Joni Ernst wins her bid for an open U.S. Senate seat in Iowa, the Democrats will lose their majority in the upper chamber.

After Iowa’s longtime Democrat Senator Tom Harkin announced he would not run for re-election, Iowa Democrats chose trial lawyer Bruce Braley as the man to face State Senator and Republican candidate Joni Ernst.

But Braley has run an often inept campaign and, as the hours before Election Day on November 4 tick down, his Republican opponent has begun to pull ahead of him in polls in a year that seems to be trending toward the Republicans all across the nation.

Harkin himself even seems to sense that Braley is a flawed candidate. The Iowa stalwart has been criticized for refusing to release any of his mountains of campaign cash to assist Braley this year.

Now, with Ernst gaining in the polls, Democrat majority leader Reid is warning that if Ernst wins, all will be lost for the liberals. Reid also laments that a Senator Ernst would mean he’d lose his leadership job.

“What Joni Ernst would mean, coming to the United States Senate, is that Mitch McConnell would be the leader of the Senate, someone who agrees with her on virtually everything. Think what that would mean to our country,” Reid said on Friday.

The Majority Leader was speaking on a conference call to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hoping to encourage the group’s liberal members to join in a phone bank effort to push Braley’s candidacy.

The PCCC has proudly proclaimed itself to be in the “Elizabeth Warren Wing” of the Democrat coalition and is working to push only the most far left candidates.

But Braley has done himself no favors in Iowa by being heard at least twice denigrating farmers in the mostly rural farming state. He even brought scorn on himself for suing his next door neighbor because she had a chicken coop on her property that he wanted removed.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com